The Apps You Need Right Now

In an effort to better serve her non-paying clientele, Life in the Boomer Lane has made an exhaustive, as well as exhausting, survey of some of the 10 billion apps that are now available on smart phones, that enable people to live healthier, more stress-free lives. This research was done between the end of one cup of coffee and the trip to the kitchen to refill her cup. For that reason, she is limiting the list, and not including the following:

Health Apps telling you how many calories you are consuming, how many steps you are walking, how many beats your heart is beating, how high your blood pressure is and how many brain cells you are losing per minute as you go about your day. The answer to the last item is: a lot. You seriously don’t want all this information.

Music Apps, including every song every written since the dawn of time, every bit of information about every person who has ever sung a song since the dawn of time, and a personal tracker for Justin Beiber, Beyonce, and Lil Wayne.

Sports Apps, including 24/7 scores for every sports game being played across the planet, live video feed of said sports, and statistics proving that the 2007 Swedish Bunny Jumping Team was way superior to the 1993 North Korean Prison Chain Rattling Team.

Celebrity Apps, including a special Kim Kardashian sub-app, showing exactly what fabulous and selfied actvities Kim is engaged in, while you are going about your meaningless drudge of a day.

Instead, she now presents some apps that will actually help you navigate the tsunami of life:

Find My CarLBL has spent the better part of her waking hours in an often unsuccessful attempt to locate her car. While she appreciates the classic design of most underground garages, and the orderliness of most outdoor parking lots, she is becoming increasingly aware that she may not have enough years left in her life in which to pursue this fun pastime. This app allows you to actually find your car, leaving plenty of free time to lose other items of importance in your life.

TileIf, like LBL, your car is merely the tip of the Lost and Found Iceberg of Life, Tile allows to tag all precious items with actual tags. These actual tags emit some kind of space age rays into your phone, which then finds your item. Anything can be tagged, including the phone itself as long as you have an iPad. Other useful items to tag include car keys, the TV remote, the land line phone, the cat, one’s coffee mug, and one’s spouse/children.

EyeReaderThis dandy app is actually a magnifying glass, for pesky restaurant menus or whatever else one wants to magnify beyond all reason. A note of caution: Do not use this on your skin, especially that of your hand. Aside from getting a manicure every once in awhile, looking at hands should be avoided entirely.

ParkmobileThere are lots of apps like this. Forget having to use your credit card on a smart meter. Forget putting in too little money and then forgetting to go to the meter and then you run out and you already have a ticket because the cops are spending all of their time watching your meter and not arresting known felons. This app connects to your credit card. Punch in the meter numbers, get the time you want, and, when you are running down on minutes, your phone alerts you. Of course, if you are in the movie theater and have turned your phone off, we wish you the best of luck.

LevelUp allows you to pay for store purchases via iPhone, using the square thingy symbol on items. LBL wants to call it a G Spot, but it’s actually called a QR code.

EverNote allows you capture whatever you want to on your phone: notes, anything written, photos, anything anyone tells you that you want to remember. Of course, EverNote has no ability to remind you of all the wonderful things you have stored, so this may not be as helpful as one would assume.

Life360 allows one to stalk everyone in one’s life, as long as they are on the same network. Personally, LBL doesn’t care where her friends and family are during the course of a day, unless they are approaching her door and she isn’t wearing a bra.

EasilyDo allows one to keep all data from one’s life in one handy place. LBL avoids anything that reminds her of everything going on in her life. She prefers to take things one-at-a-time, especially if those things are limited to Eat. Repeat.

I should get the find my car app. Right now my husband wants to put one of those orange Styrofoam balls on the top of my antenna so I can find it. My keyless fob does beep but in a mass of cars that doesn’t always help. We are not exactly a high tech couple and I appreciate your help.

I have Evernote and Life360–Evernote is my permanent go-to since Springpad supposedly shut down to house my blog research clippings. The key is fully using the folder and tagging functions; you may still drag at finding whatever you filed, but this gives you a fighting chance. I got Life360 for a slightly more somber reason (in addition to being able to track my phone’s location)–a young teacher in our area disappeared for months after a night out with friends, and while she was found to have accidently driven into a nearby bayou rather than abducted as earlier suspected, someone mentioned in an article or post that this app might have helped to locate her sooner.

As for the rest–with the exception of LevelUp, as I refuse to go iPhone–I’m going to definitely have to look into those. Do they make Tiles small enough to put on eyeglasses?

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